Description

At thirty-seven, Lydia has been with the middle-aged Tom for over a decade, and she is bored. Yet when he leaves her, she is surprisingly devastated, and makes contact with Tom’s nineteen-year-old son, Caleb, fresh out of his third stint of rehab. Spare, lyrical & shot through with an unflinching wit, this book announces a major new talent.

Publisher Review

Lydia is unsettled in her New York life. She takes herself away to Greece,
secure in the belief that her much-older partner Tom will be there on her
return. However, when she comes back, she discovers he’s fallen in love
with someone else. Her life now in disarray, Lydia faces a future in which
nothing is secure. When she reconnects with Tom’s teenage son Caleb,
all three lives are recast in shocking and devastating ways.
All the while we sense that in the world at large there are greater changes
happening, changes over which they have even less control.

Isobel Wohl’s precise, brilliant, hyper-observant prose lays bare the everchanging rules by which we try to conduct our lives, and in its
astonishing conclusion, the novel asks us its most profound question:
how do we want to live?